The Post

Half-hour trip that robs some Kiwis of 10 years of life

- Max Rashbrooke Senior associate, Institute for Governance and Policy Studies, Victoria University of Wellington-Te Herenga Waka

Yesterday I embarked on the most depressing road trip imaginable. It began in hilly Wadestown, one of Wellington’s wealthiest suburbs, where serene white-painted villas, each one a picture of colonial confidence, fetch an average of $1.5 million at auction.

The suburb’s inhabitant­s, who like its houses tend to be white, enjoy rich lives – and long ones, too. As Wadestown is in the wealthiest tenth of New Zealand neighbourh­oods, boys born there will, according to official statistics, live to 85 on average, and girls to 88.

I mention this because my road trip was, at heart, a meditation on one of the most basic and alarming forms of inequality known to humankind: the disparity in the time we have on this Earth.

Life expectancy is shaped by many forces, including ethnicity: Māori live on average seven-anda-half years fewer than Pākehā. That gap is closing, albeit so slowly that parity will not be attained until 2090. Worse still is the lifeexpect­ancy gap between rich and poor, which is not just large, but widening.

Every New Zealander carries with them a mental map of the country: the hills and valleys, the crenellate­d outlines of the coast. On that map can be overlaid something that public health specialist­s call an Atlas of Inequality. It is created by totting up the markers of poverty in each area: how many people are claiming benefits, turning off heaters to save power, wearing shoes with holes because they can’t afford new ones.

The volume of these shortfalls gives an area its deprivatio­n ranking. In the resulting atlas, the least deprived are coloured offwhite. Among them is Wadestown, its cadastral pallor recalling the Double Alabaster and Eighth Parchment paint-hues that adorn the suburb’s houses.

Public health experts often talk about social gradients, the way that health declines along with income. My trip was marked, too, by an unmistakea­ble slope.

As I drove along the winding road from Wadestown, passing the private hospitals of prosperous Crofton Downs and the Ngaio residents walking their white poodles, through leafy Khandallah’s Empire-themed streets and down towards commuter-belt Johnsonvil­le, I could see in my mind’s eye the Atlas of Inequality changing hue, shading from white into yelloworan­ge as the level of deprivatio­n slowly rose.

In Johnsonvil­le, the quintessen­tial Kiwi suburb, modern and comparativ­ely modest houses were selling for a mere $1m on average. Just 10 minutes into my journey, life expectancy had already fallen: boys born here might expect to live to 81, girls to 84, several years less than their wealthier counterpar­ts.

From there I continued north, shadowing the train line down to sprawling Tawa, reportedly home to more churches than any New Zealand suburb.

Like Johnsonvil­le, it was a sea of yellow-orange zones of middling affluence, spotted with small islands of deprivatio­n marked in the red that, in the atlas, denotes the most deprived tenth of neighbourh­oods. Tawa’s life expectancy was, on average, fair, if a shade lower than it had been back down the road.

By the time I reached Porirua, crossing over the highway and entering the city’s east, the atlas in

my mind was a blotch of angry scarlet. Islands of deprivatio­n had become a sea. And life expectancy had plummeted, to 74 for boys and 78 for girls.

From Wadestown to Waitangiru­a, in a trip that took just half an hour, 10 years of expected life had ebbed away.

As I sat in my car, parked outside Waitangiru­a’s strip of roller-door shops, I thought about

all the barriers that society puts in the way of poorer families trying to live well. The racism. The underfunde­d schools. The health system that charges people to see a GP. The mouldy homes that send kids to hospital with respirator­y diseases. The cost of a bag of oranges at the local superette ($4.90) versus a loaf of white bread ($1.90).

I thought about the way that poverty leaves scars – worse school results, damaged heart valves – that later affluence often can’t erase. I thought about how, in an interview, Porirua College principal Ragne Maxwell had described a community proud of its strengths, its whānau and aiga connection­s, but also habituated to people dying well before their time. ‘‘It’s a killer,’’ she said. ‘‘Poverty, in this community, is a killer.’’

I thought, too, about how easy it is to ignore these disparitie­s when they work to one’s advantage; how challengin­g – yet how enlighteni­ng – it would be for people to take that 30-minute drive, to widen their sphere of empathy.

And I thought, finally, about the urgent need to close such gaping disparitie­s in a nation that still calls itself egalitaria­n.

So many hopes, triumphs, joys – and yes, tears – are packed into a year; yet poverty robs people of 10 times that. We have only one life, and it is the most awful injustice that some get so much less of it than others.

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 ?? ?? Waitangiru­a is one of the Wellington region’s poorest suburbs. Just half an hour’s drive away, residents of the richest suburbs can expect to live 10 years longer.
Waitangiru­a is one of the Wellington region’s poorest suburbs. Just half an hour’s drive away, residents of the richest suburbs can expect to live 10 years longer.

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